Curse

urania · Sep 03, 2010, 08:27 AM // 08:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by Missing HB

Yes , problem is that generally in that format , the skills pool was terribly made ( you could usually find bsurge/ blinding dervish whereas monk couldn't get any hex remove or condition remove) .
Actually , i noticed that usually , either support skills are too poor and damage skills too strong , or support skills too good ( WoH , LS , dwayna kiss , dismiss , cure hex available ) , whereas sins and warriors cant even make a correct damage deal. It would have been nice to make maybe some thing like in costume brawl...

actually, the decks during which the damage is so overwhelming not even 2 healers can keeep up for long are awesome. hell id even go in with 4 offennsive characters a few times and make streaks.

yesterdays's deck with a mb ele (without attunements, oh gosh!) e surge mes with rupts and hex removal, blight mo and ws derv with cripple (admittedly, ws derv is one of the most broken templates in ca) was one of the best in a while.

i dont consider ca as suitable replacement for ta and do wish it be reimplemented, but it can certainly be a fun arena on some days.

Corporeal Ghost · Sep 05, 2010, 02:52 AM // 02:52

Quote:

Originally Posted by urania

actually, the decks during which the damage is so overwhelming not even 2 healers can keeep up for long are awesome. hell id even go in with 4 offennsive characters a few times and make streaks.

When we still played (we probably still would if we thought we would get matches), basically some critical mass of these things made it worth it:

strong, short-duration snares
weak-ish healing
good hex removal OR few dangerous hexes
some form of res control (Icy Prism is usually best because no one else will run it)
versatile rather than high DPS physicals

Or just Gale, which covers about three and two halves of those.

Snares are kind of double-edged, though. They have incredible utility, but it's often the case that the best strategy is just to snare the other team's highest DPS guy and train him into the ground over and over, which makes life really boring and fairly random if the other team is onto this technology. I think I actually prefer the good snares that other people don't know are good, like Deep Freeze with bad ele energy. It's absolutely phenomenal, but no one else ever ran it, so we would just crush people when it was all there was.

urania · Sep 05, 2010, 08:57 AM // 08:57

you should check for zquest days in ca - bound to bring quite a few teams to the arena.
on side note, they ought to have banned ws and woh too.

Fluffy Kittens · Sep 05, 2010, 09:05 AM // 09:05

Yeah few teams... 4-5 teams max + 2 teams syncing at 3am.
It's not about banning and allowing certain skills because point of the arena is that you have to play with what you get.
Thing is community doesn't like the arena and it should be removed ASAP.

Missing HB · Sep 05, 2010, 12:34 PM // 12:34

Yes , thats one of the problem i had the first few days when i cared to play the arena . Only 2-3 teams in outpost , thus you keep getting same opponent , buildwars saying hi .
However , looking at poll , 80% of voters don't play CA.. interesting

urania · Sep 05, 2010, 04:26 PM // 16:26

thing with banning certain skills is that the same skills that broke ta break ca, so if they refuse the balance them out with the shittier alternatives they should at least ban them.

Vlad Neraxis · Sep 05, 2010, 08:22 PM // 20:22

I play codex very little with friends or decently ranked players. TA was much better than codex (codex can never replace TA). Codex is plagued with the same problems as TA but to a greater degree.
TA had much more entertaining game play since codex you often have to play with terrible healing skills or end up playing fortress teams with monk and rit every time there is access to weapon of remedy or xinrais weapon.

nem coke · Sep 05, 2010, 11:02 PM // 23:02

I actually tried Codex 2 days ago and found it more fun than RA and TA ever were to me. You group up fast, a lot of pugs (there was zquest so yea there were many people there), you check their skills, or else...and with limited and random skill deck, you don't see all the crappy gimmicks that were constant in TA. Oh and compared to RA, amazingly I find so many better builds in CA than in RA.

king swift · Sep 06, 2010, 04:32 PM // 16:32

Add an EMOTE to codex=win.

PLAYERS NEED INCENTIVES

Corporeal Ghost · Sep 06, 2010, 05:40 PM // 17:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by urania

on side note, they ought to have banned ws and woh too

Reaper's is definitely over the top. I find Word is rarely a problem by itself. It's pretty easy to power through or get a solid one-time interrupt on to generate a kill unless their whole team is stanced up or they also have a rit or the monk bar is just completely insane.

Insane monk bar is fine since it means we also get to run it, and this means that we can run much more front-loaded offense (although there is about one pool in twenty where such offense is just not available...but it rarely overlaps with extremely strong defense).

Rit can be problematic. I'm not sure how to fix this. Definitely take out the Xinrae/Remedy/Vengeful combo. One is probably okay. Two is too many.

Stances are really only a problem because one strong stance (say, Disciplined) can be put on three or four people. Obviously this has been addressed repeatedly and ANet seemingly has no plans to restrict the quantity of any one skill, but I feel this is definitely the most elegant solution. Maybe make Wild Blow a staple? It's energy intensive and loses all adrenaline, but gives you a valid option to push kills through 4-stance teams. It's probably too good on dervs and assassins, though, so...not sure.

I guess you see me whining about defense a lot here. But it's basically because when you have two offense overload teams, matches are fast-paced and the better team almost always wins. When you have defense mirrors, you often just have 8-minute yawnfests that both teams lose.

Quote:

Originally Posted by king swift

PLAYERS NEED INCENTIVES

Can't say I agree with this. For one thing, this type of incentive generally brings the type of player that will quickly abandon codex--that is, given a healthy Codex Arena where people can actually get matches and cannot resign for points, the guys who want to grind for titles won't really be able to win enough matches to grind for titles. Liken them to the underworld farmers in Heroes Ascent. The difference is that in HA they can play against each other and one of them has to win. In codex, they need to play against each other five times in a row before either has what they perceive to be a tangible benefit.

So without getting into the issues of what would happen if we changed the title, what we really need is a draw for the players who will either enjoy the format enough to be good at it or are already good enough but don't have a reason to play. I think the best way to start this ball rolling is to set up ATs. They don't even need to have rewards, and it's probably better if they happen fairly infrequently...maybe once a day on a rotating schedule. This is really just to give people a universal time to show up and play. If you make them happen too much, people will spread out and you won't get enough teams to make life interesting. If they don't happen often enough, the arena sits very dead for much of the time, which is basically what we have now. Except that instead of a three or four hour stretch, we have a full day. You might see 30 or 40 teams over the course of a day, but never more than 3 or 4 at once because it's always scattered.

However, I can't really advocate this. As much as I love the format, I just don't think its worth the resources that will be taken away from fixing the rest of the game, just as I don't think it's worth the resources to replace Codex with some other arena.

urania · Sep 06, 2010, 10:02 PM // 22:02

woh is over the top when there is one (or a combination of) the following ca deck types:
1)no or barely any caster shutdown (rupts or hexes)
2)patient or/and vig and/or bonettis (bonettis is really over the edge in ca too - often found on all group members when there's no stance removal)
3)sucky offense.

but on the other side, crip sweep+ws spam with little to no cond removal is just as strong as woh can be in those cases.

Mashiyu · Sep 06, 2010, 11:47 PM // 23:47

+1 for codex random arenas

Corporeal Ghost · Sep 07, 2010, 09:01 AM // 09:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by urania

woh is over the top when there is one (or a combination of) the following ca deck types:
1)no or barely any caster shutdown (rupts or hexes)
2)patient or/and vig and/or bonettis (bonettis is really over the edge in ca too - often found on all group members when there's no stance removal)
3)sucky offense.

Pretty much. I just find that those don't line up often enough to really merit a ban.

Wounding Strike, on the other hand, is just ludicrously overpowered (I think I accidentally called it Reaper's above, which is also overpowered, but not nearly on the same level). You can't even try to combat it without deep condi removal, so you just bring your own. It's basically EDA, except it makes matches really fast instead of really slow and it doesn't counter itself. I don't think there are any other skills besides those two where a single copy dominates the entire match no matter what the skill composition of each team is.

galactic · Oct 01, 2010, 11:44 PM // 23:44

i dont want to wait around making a build for 4 hours

i would rather just go sync/monk RA and get real title points